I see the night sky as a jewellery store window and my mind is half a brick

Tom Waits Insights #2

Basically, you're making songs. It's kind of like catching a rabbit — you want to make sure
you catch something that's living and its tricky. So it's more like photographing ghosts. You're setting up this equipment, this elaborate trap, this very expensive contraption, so that you can capture the fly in the bottle.

It's hard sometimes because I think, basically, songs don't like to be recorded; I think they change in the process. At the same time, until a song is recorded, it's really not finished. It's a delicate operation and requires in some ways almost medical precision and, at the same time, almost a total blind intuition.